Seeds

My digital garden is hosted at https://notes.bmannconsulting.com. Below are some pathways into the garden, and seeds of ideas and concepts. You can also browse the note representing this page directly.

Recent

  • Lots of Mastodon, Bluesky and general future of DecentSocial
  • The dark forest and cozyweb are important concepts for thinking about the web today
  • I think a lot about commons funding. I haven't done enough original writing about it. Open Collective is a great platform I recommend for managing funding and disbursement, without needing a foundation or organization of any kind.

Seeds

To sum things up, we’re trying to run a planetary society that needs to solarpunk the fuck out of itself in a hurry on the collective intelligence of an 18th century principality that’s heard of the Enlightenment from some guy at the pub.

The Internet Transition by Robin Berjon governance

It’s so powerfully obvious to me, it might as well be written in ten-foot letters of flame: the platforms of the last decade are done.

I said it in April 2022, and I believe it even more today: their only conclusion can be abandonment; an overdue MySpace-ification.

A Year of New Avenues, by Robin Sloan

Unlike the main public internet, which runs on the (human) protocol of “users” clicking on links on public pages/apps maintained by “publishers”, the cozyweb works on the (human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams. Much of this content is poorly addressable, poorly searchable, and very vulnerable to bitrot.

The Extended Interent Universe, by Venkatesh Rao dark forest cozyweb

Software companies founded today are competing less with pen and paper than with other Internet-first incumbents. Put another way, as happens in every maturing industry before it, Internet company revenue will become zero-sum. As a corollary, the time between founding years of software startups and their competitive incumbents is shrinking:

When Tailwinds Vanish future of venture

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